CRN Storage News

NetApp's Lee Caswell and SolidFire CEO David Wright discussed NetApp's plans for SolidFire, how SolidFire differs from and complements NetApp's other all-flash storage technologies, and partnering with Cisco and competing with Dell-EMC.

The initiative aims to help partners and customers understand the vendor's focus on new ways to provide data protection and availability, Veritas' Tricia Atchison tells an audience of solution providers at XChange.

Tegile is bracketing the all-flash storage array market with a high-end model featuring both a performance tier and a capacity tier of flash storage, and an entry-level model with a new low-capacity configuration that it hopes will get into smaller clients.

Saying it would move to all-flash for all future primary storage solutions, EMC rolled out an all-flash version of its flagship VMAX array, and the DSSD D5, a high-performance, all-flash rack-scale solution for data-intensive applications.

Hyper-converged infrastructure leader Nutanix, which had been expected to debut early this year on the public market, may be putting that move off because of stock market volatility and the poor showing some of its peers have had recently, according to CNBC.

NetApp just closed its acquisition of all-flash storage array upstart SolidFire, but is moving fast to integrate the company into its portfolio while juggling a big planned reduction in its workforce and slipping revenue and earnings.

Nimble Storage, long a champion of hybrid flash-and-disk arrays, introduced its first all-flash array and immediately staked its claim as providing all-flash solutions with the industry's highest performance and largest capacity.

Channel partners say that Veritas, which just updated its Enterprise Vault and Data Insight solutions, faces much more competition than when it was acquired by Symantec, but feel Veritas has been making the right moves to help return to its former glory.

The significantly upgraded VSAN 6.2 software-defined storage solution, combined in a new hyper-converged infrastructure software stack with vSphere and vCenter Server, will be the base of a new VCE solution expected to be released next week.

The Acronis Partner Program for Cloud, slated to be formally introduced later this week, is aimed at helping partners with services capabilities more easily make the decision to move data protection to the cloud.

Doron Kempel says selling hyper-convergence can be challenging for solution providers, but success will come from taking business from competitors that are unprepared or hesitant to embrace the technology.